Oligopolistic Competition Among Cloud Providers in Electricity and Data Networks

Abstract

Cloud computing as an emerging computing model provides computing resources as general utilities for the end-users through the Internet. This paper presents a market structure to address the competition among cloud providers in the wholesale electricity market and cloud computing market (CCM). The cloud providers compete to serve the customers in the CCM while they bid for the electricity demand in the wholesale market. The proposed market structure highlights the interdependence among electricity and cloud computing infrastructure systems by introducing the dynamic game with complete information among cloud providers in the wholesale market and the CCM. At each infrastructure system, the operation strategies of the market participants are determined by forming bilevel optimization problems in which the upper-level problem maximizes the payoff of the market participants while the lower-level problem represents the corresponding market settlement process. Independent system operator ensures the security and reliability of the network in the wholesale market while the demand and supply are balanced in the CCM to determine the price of the offered computing resources. A case study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.